Iphigenia in Tauris was written by the Greek playwright Euripides in approximately 414 BCE. Helen, also composed by Euripides (ca. 412) reflects many of the situations of Iphigenia in Tauris. The myth of Iphigenia (also used by Euripides later in Iphigenia in Aulis) was reflected in Stasinus’s Cypria, an epic poem of roughly the seventh century BCE, which served as a “prequel” to the events of Homer’s Iliad.

In this version of the myth, Agamemnon, Iphigenia’s father, kills a deer, a symbol of the goddess Artemis. Enraged, Artemis sends the northern winds that prevent the Greeks from going to war with Troy and even wreck their ships. Agamemnon prepares to sacrifice Iphigenia in order to appease Artemis’s wrath in the hope of regaining control over their fleet, but the goddess, being appeased by the father’s grief, rescues the girl. The worshipers see the deer on the altar instead, while Iphigenia is miraculously transported to the land of the Taurians (the modern-day Crimean Peninsula) and becomes a priestess in Artemis’s temple. In this form, the myth spread beyond Greece. Thus, Herodotus reports that the Scythians worship the virgin goddess (the local counterpart of Artemis), adding that they call her Iphigenia.

There existed other versions of the myth of Iphigenia, and it reflected various layers of motifs and ideas. Artemis was originally a zoomorphic goddess worshiped in the form of a bear or deer. In time, she became a protector of these animals and was said to take revenge on humankind for hunting them.

Human sacrifices, common in the archaic epochs, were seen later as atrocities, which is why Iphigenia does not perish on the altar. The custom of sacrificing humans to Artemis is ascribed to the barbarians from whose hands Orestes is to rescue the goddess’s image defiled by the shedding of human blood:

If ever mortal hand be dark with blood;
Nay, touch a new-made mother or one slain
In war, her ban is on him. ’Tis a stain
She driveth from her outer walls; and then
Herself doth drink this blood of slaughtered men?
Could ever Leto, she of the great King
Beloved, be mother to so gross a thing?
These tales be lies, false as those feastings wild
Of Tantalus and Gods that tore a child.
This land of murderers to its god hath given
Its own lust; evil dwelleth not in heaven.

Agamemnon at first refuses to commit such a horrible act against his own daughter, but he soon gives in to the demands of Artemis (only for her to stop the sacrifice from being carried out).

Just as the other Greek poets who elaborated on this myth (Stasinus, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles), Euripides treats the traditional version with liberty. Hence, we have in Iphigenia in Tauris such novelties as Iphigenia’s dream of her father’s palace and her decision to send the letter to Argos, the figure of the herdsman, the brother and sister recognizing each other, and so on.